Below: Syrian migrants clamber under a razor-wire fence into Hungary at the border with Serbia, near

Roszke.

Contention 1: NATO sucks like really bad

NATOs plan to deal with border conflict is to completely shut out all people of color
that “pose a threat” making them illegal immigrants rather than refugees.

Atlantic Council, 9-14-2015, ("NATO's new strategy: stability generation,"

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/nato-s-new-strategy-stability-generation/)

Deciding on NATO’s strategic ends requires looking at the critical challenges facing NATO. The key current
problems are substantial and well-known: 1) Russia in the East: Russia has become both a source of instability and a strategic adversary in the
East. One can follow a series of Russian actions, foreshadowed as early as President Putin’s speech at the Munich conference in 2007, where he
stated that NATO’s expansion was a “serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”1 Russia has continued to view NATO through
a hostile lens, placing NATO at the top of its asserted security concerns in its recent national military doctrine.2 Much more important than
rhetoric, however, have been Russian actions, which have included armed incursion into and occupation of areas of Georgia and the annexation
of Crimea. More recently, Russia’s active support and involvement in the ongoing Ukraine conflict include arming insurgents while denying such
support, employing inflammatory propaganda, and fostering civil unrest. But Russian
actions extend beyond Ukraine. They
also include provocative overflights and the harassment of air, land, and sea traffic of many neighboring
countries, including NATO allies; intimidation and covert operations; financial manipulation; kidnapping
and illegal border crossings; snap military exercises and deployments near borders; and casual threats of
using nuclear weapons. Along with these external activities, the Russian government has extensively repressed domestic democratic
entities. 2) Syria and Iraq: The NATO nation facing the most immediate threat from conflict on its borders is
Turkey, with instab ility arising from both Syria and Iraq. The ongoing multi-directional civil war in Syria,
including its humanitarian consequences with some ten million refugees and internally displaced
persons, presents highly pressing concerns (including to its other neighbors Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon)
as does the overlapping conflict in Iraq. The conflicts are a reflection of the increasingly severe Sunni-
Shia split in the Muslim world. The conflicts not only have severe consequences for the region, but also
for other NATO members because of the ideological and anti-Western aspects of the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al-Qaeda affiliates and the number of foreign fighters, including those from
NATO countries. As the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has said , France “is at war with terrorism,
jihadism and radical Islamism” (though, he made clear, not with ordinary Muslims and their religion).3 3) The Mediterranean and
the South: While Libya and Mali present active conflicts , the entire Mediterranean is a source of instability ,
including the problem of violent Islamic extremism. This ideologically infused instability has generated
ongoing terrorist attacks in the Sinai Peninsula, Tunisia, and elsewhere , which have fueled illegal
immigration into Europe. Violent Islamic extremism requires significant analysis and the development of
effective responses, including to the problem of home-grown terrorism. The issues surrounding illegal
immigration have become increasingly severe , and the countries of the EU are internally engaged in
generating effective responses.

NATO and the EU depict migrants as criminals to strengthen their borders and
continue to displace innocent people

Yasmin Ibrahim & Anita Howarth (2018) (Anita Howarth specializes in the interaction between journalism/media, politics and
risk. She is currently working as a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Brunel University in London. Prior to entering academia, Anita worked as a journalist on
the business press, online news sites and financial desk of a national newspaper) (Yasmin Ibrahim is a Professor of Digital Economy and Culture. She has
written and published extensively on new media technologies and migration. She has been involved in numerous editorial boards and presently serves on
the Editorial board for Sociology.. She is the convenor for Borderlines, an interdisciplinary research cluster in the school. She has contributed extensively
to Equality and Inclusion work both in the School and College). Communicating the ‘migrant’ other as risk: space, EU and expanding borders, Journal of
Risk Research, 21:12, 1465-1486, DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2017.1313765

Ascribing of criminality to the migrant, particularly those already in the EU, was a critical discursive
technique in legitimizing the fortification of defences at Calais and in transferring risk and responsibility
to the migrant body. As the scale of the crisis magnified, discourse shifted from the individual
‘stowaway’ detected by border police so presented as ‘evidence’ of the effectiveness of controls to the
metaphoric and Cameron’s de-humanizing ‘swarm’ or ‘marauders’ captured in Foreign Secretary Philip
Hammond’s interview with journalists (Legrain 2015; Mortimer 2015). While the displaced person in the UN camps
outside the EU could be categorized a ‘refugee’ and those risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean
‘migrants’ or ‘people’ colluding with smugglers out of desperation, by the time they reached Calais they
were presented as intent on criminal entry into Britain . Their actions were presented as aggressive, a
violation of the nation space or concealing movement for the purposes of deception so suggesting a
subversion of the legal and hence highlighting the threat to the UK. Constructing developments in Calais in these terms conjured up associations of
waves of barbarian raiders having breached the outer defences of Europe and threatening Britain’s second line of defence in Calais (Cameron 2015b). Breaches of the defences were captured in accounts of migrants walking along

While the refugees and

railway tracks, disruptions to trains and infiltrating of lorries. These recurrent references conveyed the sense of constant pressure on and transgressions of the borders.

displaced in the UN camps were not assumed to be criminal, the migrants in Calais were and the risk
they pos associated with international developments and terrorism into a more amorphous and ever
widening sense of danger. The ‘threats to our security’ had ‘grown enormously ’ ranging from Russia’s
invasion of the Ukraine on the eastern border of the EU to the emergence of ISIL and the migration
flows triggered by the war in Syria. (Cameron 2015h). What emerged was a sense of the EU under siege on two fronts and the Paris attacks 17 materialized what might otherwise have
seemed to be a distant threat, demonstrating a “direct and growing threat to our country” (Cameron 2015a). Besides criminality and threat of terrorism, the

migrant was also presented as opportunistic and a disruptive force to the economy . The port workers
strike had led to the temporary closure of the port and “unacceptable disruption” of traffic and trade
(Cameron 2015b). The more pressing concern for the Cameron government was opportunistic migrants taking

advantage of the disruption to breach the perimeter fences. Lorry drivers, tourists and local residents in
South East England were seen as particularly vulnerable to ‘clandestines’ seeking to sneak into the
vehicles. The British government again presented itself as acting responsibly and morally to mitigate the risk to legitimate traffic posed by migrants by fortifying its borders constantly. The nature and scale of the threat,
the trespassing onto rail property and the disruption to legitimate traffic and trade served to legitimize measures more commonly associated with national security. The 'NATO fence'4 usually

used to protect world leaders at summits from terrorist attacks was for the first time in history deployed
outside UK and erected in Calais to ‘protect’ train platforms from migrants (Cameron 2014). Further securitization
and militarization of the border controls sought to mitigate the risks presented by this influx of migrants
and to create “secure” spaces in which UK-bound lorries and cars within the port could be insulated
from “clandestine” activities (May 2015c). Freight vehicles were subjected to “intensified screening” using the
“best techniques and technologies in the world” (May 2015a) intended to detect hidden bodies, otherwise
invisible to the naked eye. The detailed descriptions and lists of border technologies deployed to detect
and deter served to materialize what the government meant by controls: “hard” had become
synonymous with militarization and securitization. Statistics were used to capture the supposed effectiveness of these measures (Cameron, 2016a). Between
21 June and 11 July, 11000 attempts were ‘successfully intercepted at juxtaposed ports’ in France.

NATO patrols the borders with the sole purpose of blocking migrants from
entering the country

Nato, 2-11-2016, ("Assistance for the refugee and migrant crisis in the Aegean Sea," NATO,
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_128746.htm)

Following a request from Germany, Greece and Türkiye, NATO defence ministers decided [in] on 11
February 2016 to assist with the growing refugee and migrant crisis in Europe. NATO has deployed a
maritime force in the Aegean Sea to conduct reconnaissance, monitoring and surveillance of illegal
crossings, in support of Turkish and Greek authorities and the EU’s Frontex agency.
NATO maritime forces are deployed in the Aegean Sea to contribute critical, real-time information to Greece and Türkiye, as well as to Frontex, in light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

NATO's Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2) is conducting reconnaissance, monitoring and
surveillance of illegal crossings in the territorial waters of Greece and Türkiye, as well as in international
waters with its maritime and air assets. It is sharing whatever relevant information it finds with the
Greek and Turkish coast guards and authorities. NATO is also sharing this information in real-time with
Frontex so that it can take even more effective action. Since NATO’s ships are larger than Frontex
vessels, NATO sensors and radars have a broader reach and complement Frontex assets.
The purpose of NATO’s deployment is to assist Allies and Frontex in carrying out their duties in the face of the crisis. In accordance with international law, all ships that sail, including NATO ships, have to rescue people in distress at
sea. Allied vessels will live up to their national responsibility to assist.

Composition and command of the deployments

The activity has been performed using part of the SNMG2 assets, significantly reinforced by additional ships provided by NATO Allies. On average, there have been around five ships involved in the Aegean.
SNMG2 is one of two Standing NATO Maritime Groups – SNMG1 and SNMG2. SNMGs fall under the
authority of Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM), Northwood, United Kingdom. These are
multinational, integrated maritime forces made up of vessels from various Allied countries. These
vessels are permanently available to NATO to perform different tasks ranging from exercises to
operational missions. They function according to the operational needs of the Alliance, therefore helping
to maintain optimal flexibility. Their composition varies and they are usually composed of between two
and six ships from as many NATO member countries.
NATO-EU cooperation

NATO has established arrangements enabling direct links with Frontex at the operational and tactical
levels. This allows the exchange of liaison officers and the sharing of information in real-time so that
Frontex can take even more effective action. The NATO Secretary General has held discussions on the
refugee and migrant crisis with several EU counterparts.

Operation Sophia in the Mediterranean Sea proves NATO intervention and

militarism

Garelli & Tazzioli 17. (Dr Glenda Garelli is an Associate Professor at the University of Leeds. Areas of expertise: migration and refugee
issues; border studies; critical human geography; urban planning) (Martina Tazzioli is part of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy, she is co-editor
in chief of the Journal Politics and on the editorial board of Political Geography Open Access. She is also a member of the Euro-African network
Migreurop that produces reports on migration, border externalisation and human rights violations. She obtained her PhD in 2013 at Goldsmiths College,
in the Department of Politics & International Relations). The biopolitical warfare on migrants: EU Naval Force and NATO operations of migration
government in the Mediterranean. Critical Military Studies, 1-20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23337486.207.1375624)

Thedeployment of military operations to govern migrations in the Mediterranean has progressively turned
to the offensive in the past three years, as military and humanitarian technologies have become increasingly
intertwined in the government of migration, staging the militaries as one of the lead actors carrying out
humanitarian tasks (Loyd, Mitchell-Eaton, and Mountz 2016; Williams 2015). The EU Operation Sophia, for instance, aims at disrupting the
business of and destroying the assets of ferrying migrants across the central Mediterranean . Likewise, the
NATO intervention in the Mediterranean is deployed to dissuade and eventually block migratory flows
towards Greece from Turkey. So these are two military-humanitarian operations deployed to attack migration
flows, their logistics of travel, and their circulation in particular sections of the Mediterranean. How do these two
operations relate to their predecessor, the Italian Mare Nostrum Operation, the first massive military deployment to govern migration in the Mediterranean Sea? The Mare Nostrum operation
was launched by the Italian government in October 2013, in the aftermath of two major shipwrecks where more than 600 people died and when Italian authorities were accused of a fatal
delay in their rescue operations.4 It was explicitly framed as a ‘military and humanitarian operation’, a label that was abundantly deployed in governmental documents and political discourse
about the operation and the migration crisis in general. While the intended governmental goal was twofold – i.e. both to save lives at sea and to prevent irregular migration to Italy – the
operation resulted mainly in a search-and-rescue mission. In this capacity, Mare Nostrum was the Italian military response to the international obligation to safeguard life at sea. Amid lack of
support for its continuation under EU control and funding, the mission closed after one year. As we point to a turn to the offensive in these military operations, our goal is not to make a
historiographical argument, positing a humanitarian ‘before’ (the Mare Nostrum operation) versus a warfare-led ‘afterward’ (Operation Sophia and the NATO intervention). Rather, our aim is
to map different configurations of the military-humanitarian technology of migration management. In other words, the use of military technologies in the government of migration is not about

a transition from humanitarianism to war, even as warfare tactics of migration management at sea have grown significantly
What is at stake in the Mediterranean , in fact, is not a
(Chandler 2001). It is important to underline that we speak about warfare, not war.

deliberate politics of killing but, rather , a politics of containment and a war at low intensity, as our analysis will
show. Security and humanitarian technologies have historically coalesced in the EU governance of

migration. In fact, a clear-cut distinction speaks more to different institutional jurisdictions – military and humanitarian domains – rather than actual functions performed. For instance,
humanitarian organizations like United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) support the removal and repatriation
of irregular migrants. The same is true for the military and humanitarian regimen nexus in migration management (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010): the deployment
of military tools and the protection of lives are part of the military-humanitarian approach to migration
management. This holds true both when the militaries perform search and rescue missions to save shipwrecking migrants and when military units perform a naval blockade against
the cross-Mediterranean travels of migrants and refugees. Mare Nostrum rescue interventions and the EU and NATO operations map the changing
configurations of military humanitarianism – not necessarily a from-to transition (from humanitarianism to militarism) but
the flexibility associated with a governmental technology . Such flexibility consists in the capacity to
reconfigure and modify control according to how the trajectories and crossing practices of migrants
change. Having clarified our approach, we now turn to discuss the two military-humanitarian operations that are the focus of this paper. The first was EUNAVOFOR MED, or
Operation Sophia, which was launched in June 2015 by the EU. Already more than 100,000 people had crossed
the Mediterranean seeking refuge in Europe that year, with over 1830 reported to have perished at sea as they
took the unseaworthy, extremely expensive, and only passage out of war and violence available to them.
Issued in the aftermath of yet another tragic shipwreck in which about 900 migrants were lost at sea, Operation Sophia was the first large-scale military

operation of migration management in the Mediterranean. It was presented by EU authorities as an

intervention to ‘save’ migrants from perilous waters and from pitiless traffickers and smugglers, and as a
‘response’ – indeed, a humanitarian response of rescue – to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean . But
more than the ‘search-and-rescue’ mission of Mare Nostrum, the declared goal of Operation Sophia was to ‘ disrupt the business

model of smuggling and trafficking’ people from Libya to the EU . As we explain elsewhere (Garelli and Tazzioli forthcoming a), this
goal aims to destroy the logistics of migrants’ crossings , disrupting the ferrying of people to European
shores, and potentially closing the central Mediterranean migration route. This offensive move against
migrant travels was justified in humanitarian terms , i.e. in the name of ‘protecting’ migrants from the
abusive practices of smugglers. Headquartered in Rome and deployed in the central Mediterranean route, the operation consisted of three phases, starting with the
surveillance and assessment of human smuggling networks in the central Mediterranean (this phase has concluded at the time of writing), then turning to the search and diversion of suspicious
vessels, and finally to engaging in the disposal of smugglers’ vessels and assets ‘preferably before use’ – as EU authorities put it in official documents – and in the apprehension of smugglers. By

the end of January 2016, during its first semester of operation, Operation Sophia had led to the arrest of 46 suspected smugglers, the
disposal of 67 boats, and the rescue of 3078 migrants , as the Operation Commander, Rear Admiral Enrico Credendino of the Italian Navy, explained
in his restricted report to the EU, which was brought to public attention by WikiLeaks (Credendino 2016, 3). In February 2016, the NATO security alliance responded to

requests of assistance from Turkey, Germany, and Greece and staged its first intervention in the EU ‘refugee crisis’. The
goal of the intervention was to extend the EU operational area to Turkish territorial waters, as noted by the
executive director of the EU Border Agency, Fabrice Leggeri.5 Since Turkey is part of the NATO Security Alliance, the NATO intervention could extend into Turkish territorial waters, whereas the
EU’s couldn’t

Methods used to keep immigrants out of Europe are biotechnology– their only
purpose to inflict pain and destroy migrant flesh

Ibrahim, Y. (2020). (Yasmin Ibrahim is a Professor of Digital Economy and Culture. She has written and published extensively on new media
technologies and migration. She has been involved in numerous editorial boards and presently serves on the Editorial board for Sociology. She is the
convenor for Borderlines, an interdisciplinary research cluster in the school. She has contributed extensively to Equality and Inclusion work both in the
School and College). The U.K. and ‘razor-wire humanitarianism’: The refugee crisis and the aesthetic of violence. Fast Capitalism, 17(2), 95–110.
https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202002.007)

Barbed wire and razor wire are types of steel wire used in forming barriers and fences, and have been
used throughout modern history. These technologies are implicated in the enactment of the boundaries
of property, prisons, and borders transcending and transgressing species, places, and times (Netz
2004:39). By targeting the flesh as a mechanism of control, it collapses the distinction between man and
animal, reframing them as equally susceptible to pain and suffering. Barbed wire, as a biotechnology to
inflict pain and socially condition human and animal behavior, reveals the “ essential inhumanity of the
industrial world” and “modern technology’s destructive power ” (Razac 2002:49). As tools in colonization
and pacification of peoples in conquering new lands and territories, these stand for resistance against
infiltration by the Other and containment of the Other . Barbed wire is affordable and easy to erect, in comparison to razor wire which is usually used to restrain
cattle. Razor wire, on the other hand, is used for high-security fences. Barbed wire has come to signify a particular architecture of violence and control while it is co-located with the piercing of the flesh, suffering, and recall to
prompt withdrawal. Developed initially as an agricultural tool in the American West, barbed wire is intimately rooted in the “idea of relationship between flesh and iron” by socializing and manipulating animals through violence

In examining the genealogy of the barbed wire, Netz (2004) firmly entrenches violence, pain, and
(Netz 2004:38).

withdrawals as a means to prevent transgression and movement. By cutting through the boundary of
our skins, it impacts the nerves, sending a message to the brain about pain, prompting a withdrawal. In
an exhibition in San Antonia in 1876, dozens of fierce-looking longhorn bulls were packed into a plaza
surrounded by barbed wire fences. These animals were deliberately frightened and provoked to charge at the fence but restrained reflexively from doing so due to their recall of pain
inflicted by the sharp metal tearing their flesh. These wounded animals ‘learned’ from repeated attempts to instinctively withdraw and be restrained in that boundary. The spectacle as a symbolic

act of submission and compliance revealed how the untamed could learn to respect the definition of a
boundary and its limits while affirming the violent aesthetic of the barbed wire as a cheap, flexible and
effective tool of surveillance and containment in controlling animals without human intervention (Netz 2004: 30–
31). With particular relevance to the American West, this act of taming had a salience where cattle brought by the Spanish had become ‘semi-feral,’ and the barbed wires ‘served to re-tame, by shock, an entire breed’ (Netz

Barbed wire played a notable role in the colonization of the American West by providing control
2004:38).

based on violence on a vast scale against animals and indigenous Americans alike (see Hayter 1939). The expansion of the railroad,
as well as barbed wire enclosures, became critical to “the frontier advances and the retreat of American Indians” in the Western colonization of America as these modern industrial tools effectively “ended the American Indians
existence as nations and their resistance to the white man” (Razac 2002:14). American Indians ‘cursed’ the barbed wire as “The Devil’s Rope” as it closed off their traditional hunting grounds, hampered night raids on cattle, and

Not only was barbed wire a technology of

“assisted in their pacification” (Krell 2002:38) through the brutal violence it wreaked on their bodies and their possessions.

colonization, but also it emerged with the gun, steamboat, and railway as critical tools in the emergence
of capitalism. Netz (2004) argues that the critical ‘discovery’ that facilitated capitalism was that private ownership encouraged intensive investment and higher profits. The enclosure of fields first in Britain and then
in America became the ‘hallmark of capitalism’ (Netz 2004:20). Barbed wire was a ‘transformative’ technology as it provided the symbolism of a fence to keep animals or people or out; it used force through the infliction of pain as
an educative strategy to tame animals and people, and control their movement. Netz (2004:50) argues that the barbed wire and the urge to bring space under control symbolizes the age of capitalism. He sees the “true economic
significance” of barbed wire in the capitalist concentrations of land, cattle, and industries. The mass production of barbed wire and its effectiveness in controlling movement also meant it was ideally suited to warfare. The British
army adapted barbed wire for military use to restrict the movement of Boer guerrilla units over vast expanses (Weiss 2011). Zionist settlers moving into territory formerly occupied by Palestinians relied on barbed wire to fence off
these areas (Netz 2004:71). In the trenches of World War I, barbed wire became known as the “artificial bramble” (Razac 2002:40). Light and supple, it was immune to artillery fire and functioned as a formidable obstacle even
when broken, making it economical yet effective (Rawling 2014). Deemed dangerous and terrifying by ordinary soldiers, it became entrenched within the mythology of the war, circulating as a recurrent and dominant trope in
literary works of the war as an ‘aesthetic’ of the battlefield. Schmidt’s With Rommel in the Desert visualizes torn bodies hanging on the barbed wire, left to die and rot, “calling attention to its ability to pierce and to fix, to hold the

). The
body in stasis: a memento mori in wire” (Krell 2002:48). This speaks about barbed wire’s ultimate “capacity to turn a corpse into a spectacle … ripping clothes before the body is riddled by bullets” (Krell 2002:54

Nazi camps of World War II were surrounded with a double fence of electrified barbed wire thirteen feet
high under constant surveillance from watchtowers which elongated their aesthetic of violence (Razac 2002). The
centrality of the barbed wire fence in demarcating the camp meant that it was usually the first structure erected even before the construction of the camp. It not only marked the boundaries of the camp but was crucial in

. Gas chambers and crematoriums had separate barbed wire fences within the
organizing space and hierarchies within the camp

camps. Not only did it separate the camp from ‘normal society,’ it produced the bounded space as
infinite (signifying both the empty time and space of captivity) as inmates never saw where the fence ended. It was equally useful in marking off spaces with special status while making arbitrary classifications visible (i.e.,
women from men, and certain nationalities were isolated, especially Soviet prisoners of war). In the Buchenwald camp, a cage made up of barbed wire dubbed the ‘rose garden’ constituted a space where the body would find its

in her account of her experiences as a doctor

limits as prisoners could be left to die from hunger or exposed to severe temperatures (Razac 2002:60). Olga Lengyel (1947:118),

in the camp, highlights the role of barbed wire in suicide and recounts how “each morning the workers
found deformed bodies on the high-tension wires. This was how many chose to put an end to their
torment”. This form of suicide, popularly known as ‘embracing the wire’ in Auschwitz-Birkenau, symbolized both containment and liberation from captivity. As such, the barbed wire became a “graphic symbol of
incarceration and political violence” and an “almost universal symbol of the camps and more generally of fascist and totalitarian violence” (Razac 2002:63-65). After the liberation of Auschwitz, Primo Levi asserted, ‘liberty; the
breach in the barbed wire gave us a concrete image of it’ (cited in Silverstein 2015:86). Razor wire remains a visceral material artifact, and its interrogation through artistic interventions today appropriates another means to query

The European borders as impenetrable installations

its brutality in enacting migration and refugee regimes against its spectacular imaginary of them as detritus entities.

and as part of Fortress Europe prompted artist Dani Ploeger to cut off a piece of the razor wire Hungary
had raised along its southern border with Serbia. A highly dangerous act, not least due to the criminal
nature of the offense in Hungarian law, but equally in view of these being fortified with heat and
movement sensors and capable of delivering an electric shock. Ploeger’s artistic inventions seek to highlight the use of ‘smart’ technologies used to
obscure their immediate violence and as such “their framing as supposedly clean and precise technologies is symptomatic of a broader cultural practice that uses narratives of technologization to justify means of violence”. 2

Exhibiting that piece of fence at the Bruthaus Gallery in Belgium, it sought to invoke the moral depravity
of delegating our “responsibility towards asylum-seekers to these tech-enhanced structures .”3

Razor and barbed wire are tools of dehumanization– tearing migrant bodies as they
die at the border- a new form of necropolitics that analyzes the treatment of
their bodies with regards to the destination country

Ibrahim, Y. (2020). (Yasmin Ibrahim is a Professor of Digital Economy and Culture. She has written and published extensively on new media
technologies and migration. She has been involved in numerous editorial boards and presently serves on the Editorial board for Sociology. She is the
convenor for Borderlines, an interdisciplinary research cluster in the school. She has contributed extensively to Equality and Inclusion work both in the
School and College). The U.K. and ‘razor-wire humanitarianism’: The refugee crisis and the aesthetic of violence. Fast Capitalism, 17(2), 95–110.
https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202002.007)

When the ‘refugee crisis’ in Calais became an issue of renewed concern in the summer of discontent in 2015, the United Kingdom’s reticent stance towards the crisis was captured through its measured approach. A notable riposte
from the then Home Secretary, Theresa May,1 was to send in yet more ‘security fencing’ to fortify the borders in Calais to assuage the disaffection from both truckers and the public. Dubbing this the U.K.’s ‘razor wire
humanitarianism,’ this article examines how the material artifact of the razor wire is implicated in the aesthetic of violence towards the refugee and migrant bodies. Designed as a biotechnology to cause injury and trauma (or ignite

the pain of recall as a deterrent) and to equally enact a material boundary against bare life (collapsing distinctions between animal and human),this article utilizes razor wire as a lens
to document the United Kingdom’s treatment of the ‘precarious refugee body.’ Its sustained
consignment to death and accidents invokes the border as a spectacular of necropolitics of the ‘living
dead.’ The argument follows that these incursions with razor wire become performative sites for
dehumanizing the ‘migrant’ body. However, in the process, it equally recasts this precarious body as a
‘fleshed body,’ imbued through its corporeality and resistance against the nexus of neoliberal politics of
the razor wire designed for securitization and commercial flows of ‘legitimate’ bodies and goods. In the process,
the razor wire becomes an active theatre for the spectacularization of pain, wounding, and human struggles in the border politics of exclusion in Fortress Europe. Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’,

envisioned through the sprouting ‘jungles’ in Calais to the bodies and corpses shipwrecked on the
Mediterranean islands, produced the refugee as a tragic and contentious figure in our contemporary
moral consciousness. Fleeing from civil wars and persecution, leaving behind homelands and sacrificing
their most precious possessions (i.e., their progeny) in their passage to seek more secure geographical
terrains, the refugee is an inconvenient moral figure projecting a mirror onto the conscience of a
beleaguered West. The West is pushed into global scrutiny through this ‘refugee crisis,’ enacting it as a
battleground between morality and the neoliberal ideology of outsourcing solutions to this
humanitarian crisis to other states. The ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe as an ideological encounter between humanitarianism and the visceral politics of economic depletion is constantly played
out through the rhetoric of morality and equally through a disavowal of responsibility towards these precarious bodies, while seemingly humanitarian in its token stances. The terms ‘refugee’ and

‘migrant’ became conflated in these discourses, casting a degree of suspicion on who is the ‘real’
refugee on the one hand, while installing migration within an ambit of deviance and criminality on the
other. The ‘unruly’ movement of migrants and asylum seekers have become a key source of anxiety as
governments attempt to manage population movements in the circulatory and unpredictable context of
globalization (Hodge 2015: 124). As such, the refugee and the immoral economic counterpart, the migrant, have become inconvenient entities in the politics of the nation-state, relentlessly testing the limits of
morality and hospitality of the Enlightened West and unsettling it by shining a light onto the project of Western civilization. There have been a plethora of studies on the refugee crisis in Europe, and this paper sustains these
imperatives by appropriating a different lens of focusing on a material boundary (i.e. the border space) and its aesthetic in showcasing the sovereign power of the state and the (il)logical production of neo-liberal subjectivities and

As such, the material architectures which incarcerate the body or hold it captive or
identities through its border control.

restrain it outside of a physical boundary are important, for they have an interface with the corporeal
body which reveals its assumptions about the vulnerabilities of the human in conditions of precarity,
whereby some lives are rendered more insecure, unequal, or destitute than others (Butler 2004). Hence the material architecture
which incarcerates or alienates a deviant body, whether this is the camp, the watching tower, the gas chamber, the wall, the quarantine island or zones of juridical indeterminacy, govern and discipline the body through an
aesthetic of violence which can be performative and visual, imposing the cartography of power relations in these enactments. In imbricating the razor wire and the corporeal body into an aesthetic, the paper draws on Rancière’s
notion of “primal aesthetics” to draft maps of the trajectories between the visible and the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of making and doing; where these draft maps illuminate how

For Rancière, the space of the border as a social

unspecified groups of people “adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images” (Rancière 2006: 39).

imaginary is to conceive space politically where it is a locus for identity and the examination of practices.
The discursive formations about refugees and the material practices of dealing with them in today’s
highly unstable global political environment (i.e., post-Brexit and in the Trump era) show that our
mechanisms to control and dispel the Other have become cruder and blunter. The ‘border wall’ - the
taller and more imposing boundary that will separate Mexico and the U.S. (the one which will be
supposedly financed and built by the Global South or the lesser Other in the geopolitics of power to
dispel its very own) reveal that the material architectures perform as symbolic, rhetorical and agentive
devices while reconfiguring space through the disruptions in its interface with the migrant/refugee
body. Porous borders and fluid terrains representing economic and social solidarity amongst European nations (prior to Brexit) was presented as an ideal. Nevertheless, in reality, waves of expansion of the E.U. always
produced anxious tremors within its body politic. The E.U. as part of the European imagination catered to a European sensibility of being mature enough to accommodate a diverse, cosmopolitan community. This ideal was
naturally tested at different points in time. In the U.K., the opening up of the borders to Poland and Romania, for example, produced renewed internal anxieties of the country being invaded by Eastern Europeans who were going

to take advantage of their welfare system and deplete the local populations morally and culturally (Light & Young 2009; Ibrahim & Howarth 2016) With a refugee crisis emerging in
Europe and the sprouting of refugee camps or ‘jungles’ in Calais, one of the mechanisms to stop the
influx of refugees to the country was enacted symbolically and materially through the fortification of the
borders with razor wire. The continued fortification of the border and its sustained incursions produces
a long-running relationship with the biotechnology of the razor wire and the vulnerable corporeal body .
This material fortification conjoined with a reticent and half-hearted ‘humanitarian’ discourse of seeming to act in the best interest of the displaced further adds to the complex social imaginary of the razor wire as dispelling the

The history of barbed wire and razor wire

unwanted. This paper firstly examines the notion of ‘razor wire humanitarianism’ in the context of the biggest refugee crisis in the world.

is then explored through a genealogy of its existence and its co-location with the flesh. The border is
discussed as a space of ‘the spectacular’ in producing the theatre of bare life. The paper then goes on to
consider the relationship between razor wire and the migrant/refugee body in the border spaces of
Europe both in the co-production of corporeal vulnerabilities, formation of identities and subjectivities,
and equally the resistance to this subjugation mooted through the body and flesh of the alien body.

Borders have one main objective in our society, to keep certain people away from
elites

Mbembe 19. (Professor Achille Mbembe, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the
Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York (1988-1991), a Senior Research Fellow at the
Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. (1991-1992), Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania (1992-1996), Executive Secretary of
the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal (1996-2000). He was also a Visiting Professor at the
University of California, Berkeley (2001), at Yale University (2003), at the University of California at Irvine (2004-2005), at Duke University (2006-2011)
and at Harvard University (2012)) Bodies as borders. From the European South, 4, 5-18.)

Meanwhile, we are, more than ever before at any other time in human history, not only in close
proximity to each other but also exposed to each
other. This close proximity and exposure is experienced less and less as opportunity and possibility and, more and

more, as heightened risk. But entanglement and exposure to each other are not all that characterize the now. Wherever we look, the drive is
simultaneously and decisively towards contraction, towards containment, towards enclosure and various forms of

encampment, detention, and incarceration Typical of this logic of contraction, containment, incarceration and enclosure is the
worldwide erection of all kinds of walls and fortifications, gates and enclaves. In other words, various practices of
partitioning space, of offshoring and fencing off wealth, of splintering territories, of fragmenting spaces,
saddling them with various kinds of borders whose function is to decelerate movement, to stop it in
some instances, for certain classes of populations, in order to manage risks. Various reasons are mobilized to account for
this renewed infatuation with borders taken as the best way to manage risks. Security and the preservation of one’s identity are some of these reasons. And as it
happens, physical and virtual barriers of separation, digitalisation of databases, filing systems, the development of new tracking devices, sensors, drones, satellites
and sentinel robots, infrared detectors and various other cameras, biometric controls, and new microchips containing personal details – everything is put in place to
transform the very nature of the border in the name of security. Borders are increasingly turned into mobile, portable, omnipresent and ubiquitous realities. The

goal is to better control movement and speed, accelerating it here, decelerating it there and, in the process, sorting, recategorizing,
reclassifying people with the goal of better selecting anew who is whom, who should be where and who shouldn’t, in the

name of security. As a result, borders are no longer merely lines of demarcation separating distinct sovereign
entities. Increasingly, they are the name we should use to describe the organised violence that underpins
both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general. But perhaps, to be exact, we should not speak of
borders in general but, instead, of ‘borderization’, that is, the process by which certain spaces are
transformed into uncrossable places for certain classes of populations, who thereby undergo a process of
racialization; places where speed must be disabled and the lives of a multitude of people judged to be
undesirable are meant to be immobilized if not shattered. Whatever the case, the technological transformation of borders is in full
swing. In a sense, one of the major consequences of the acceleration of technological innovations has been the

creation of a segmented planet of multiple speed regimes A key development, of late, is the extent to which border
security practices have taken a keen interest in the connection between the human body and identity, as
a means to achieve detailed control over movement and speed. This being the case, the question we must ask is the following:
what precisely is at stake in the extension of the biometric border into multiple realms of social life and, in particular, the human body? In other words, what

explains the migration from the border understood as a particular point in space to the border as the
moving body of the undesired masses of populations ? The answer is a new global partitioning between potentially risky bodies vs.
bodies that are not. It is in the nature of risk to be hidden from view. That which is hidden from view is generally unknown. For it to be known, it must be visualized.
The screening of bodies at border checkpoints aims at making visible “that which is hidden from view,
opening up new visualizations of the unknown, potentially risky body” (Amoore and Hall 2009, 444). In such a context,
biometric technologies are supposed to fragment the human body in order to recompose it for the
purpose of securitization, of elimination and neutralization of the risk. This happens because the human body is
seen as an indisputable anchor from which data can be safely harnessed or extracted . As a result, we are
witnessing a gradually extending intertwinement of individual physical characteristics with information
systems – a process that has served to deepen faith in data as a means of risk management and faith in
the body as a source of absolute identification . In this sense, biometric technologies should perhaps be best
understood as techniques that govern both the mobility and enclosure of bodies (see van der Ploeg 2003). They
are perceived as infallible and unchallengeable verifiers of the truth about a person – the ultimate
guarantors of identity. They are supposed to produce the identification of a person beyond question,
and lend authenticity and credibility to all of the data that are connected to that identity. According to this logic,
the world would be safer if only ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty could be controlled . These technologies are assumed to provide

a complete picture of who someone is, to fix and secure identity as a basis for prediction and prevention ,
leaving people to dispute their own identity. The three mega processes I have briefly sketched are driving the movement towards what I
have called ‘planetary entanglement’, as well as its opposite, that is, enclosure, contraction, containment, encampment, and incarceration. Once again, they

are shaped by the alliance between military power, the industries that surround it (contractors), and tech
giants. They are also driven by corporate elites increasingly detached from their countries of origin and who store most of their capital in tax heavens (see Davis
2019). These elites can no longer be ‘forced to account’ through traditional means such as elections or protests. They defeat citizens’ scrutiny via complexity and
secrecy, often under the pretext of national security or via an economic rationale that puts capital first, before people. This movement is erratic, uneven. But
everywhere it heightens uncertainty and insecurity. Everywhere it institutionalizes the risks inherent in the misfortunes of reality.

Contention 2: the resolution sucks… like really bad

The impact is that migrants will either die at border crossings due to NATO’s
biotech, passing dangerous seas, or be too afraid to migrate in the first place
and are subject to violence in their home countries. As long as the status quo
remains, more blood will spill

Garelli & Tazzioli 17. (Dr Glenda Garelli is an Associate Professor at the University of Leeds. Areas of expertise: migration and refugee
issues; border studies; critical human geography; urban planning) (Martina Tazzioli is part of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy, she is co-editor
in chief of the Journal Politics and on the editorial board of Political Geography Open Access She did two postdocs at Labex, Aix-en-Provence and at the
University of Oulu. She obtained her PhD in 2013 at Goldsmiths College, in the Department of Politics & International Relations). The biopolitical warfare
on migrants: EU Naval Force and NATO operations of migration government in the Mediterranean. Critical Military Studies, 1-20.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23337486.207.1375624)

Within activist discourse and critical migration studies scholarship, the notion of “a war on migrants” has
been abundantly deployed in the past twenty years (see, in particular, Migreurop 2006; but also, Carr, 2012; Fekete, 2003; Rosiere 2012, Mazzeo 2015),
peaking in the aftermath of the 2005 killings at the Ceuta and Melilla gates of the EU. The notion has
become the critical slogan under which EU migration politics has been summarized but also challenged
by activists and critical scholars. Different policies have come to count as part of the EU “war on
migrants,” from regulations against migrant and refugees’ access to the EU space, to border
enforcement initiatives at the outer frontier of 8 the EU--within its space, and on off-shore locations--to
state violence and abuses experienced by migrants and refugees in processing and detention centers . 9 The
invocation of warfare has certainly played an important political task, especially in the Nineties, when the securitization of migration discourse in the EU context started to emerge, transforming the conversation about labor

In this context, the

migration and refugees’ mobility into a national security problem and essentializing migrant and refugees’ flows as threats for receiving countries (Bigo and Guild, 2005; Huysmans, 2006).

notion of “war on migrants” had a precise analytic purchase, pointing to the institutional violence
embedded the EU migration policies through a powerful signifier and providing a convincing critique to
border and labor policies. However, this notion has progressively lost specificity, standing for any
governmental approach to migration management, from visas regulating access, to naval blockades
against migrant flows, to the use of drones for border patrol, to human rights abuses in refugee camps,
just to name a few examples. Yet the ongoing transformations in the deployment of military approaches
and warfare practices in the Mediterranean of migrants has been problematically under-researched.
Analytical constructs for thinking through this fast-changing approach to migration management are missing, as is empirical research on its military technologies and migration control practices. But these operations enlisted in the
field of migrants’ and refugees’ travels in the Mediterranean require a critical engagement with the content, strategies, and outcomes of military practices. As a matter of fact, the military comes into play in the Mediterranean
landscape of migration, not only as the agent of externalization and border enforcement or as the arm of search and rescue missions, but also as an instrument for containing migration flows and hampering the attempts of
migrants to land in Europe. Didier Bigo has importantly underlined how the notion of “war on migrants” may be misleading, subsuming the complexity of border control under violent practices and simplistic geopolitical narratives
(Bigo 2014, 2015). Mapping the evolutions of migration management in the Mediterranean as it is carried out through military operations, we build on Bigo’s assertion, while at the same time attempting to move the conversation

Our contribution centers particularly on the practice of migration

forward in relation to unpacking the “warfare and migration” nexus.

containment, which is described by Bigo as not pertaining to warfare, especially in a context where, as
his fieldwork suggests, the “disposition” of border guards is not rooted in the intentionality to kill but in
that of “tutelage.” Thus, Bigo concludes that we cannot speak of a war on migrants. We agree and offer
the notion of warfare to describe military-humanitarian interventions of rescue and control targeting
migrants in the Mediterranean. Our approach is not that of an institutional ethnography of the military
actors engaged in these operations. By studying Operation Sophia and the NATO intervention in the
Aegean Sea, our goal is to understand how migration management is carried out as it engages militaries
and warfare technologies and how, in turn, this military approach to the government of migration
impacts migrants’ and refugees’ struggles. What is at stake for us is neither war nor border control per se but “migration management through a military technology” (Garelli and
Tazzioli, 2016). Methodologically, this means that our interest is directed toward what this military approach produces and how it re-configures the government of migration. To put it more directly, our work is an attempt to
specify what migration warfare is when it becomes a persistent biopolitical technology for governing transnational populations on the move. Methodologically this means to move beyond the level of discursive analysis in order to

While certainly our work draws from

engage with how military technologies are deployed on the terrain of Mediterranean mobility (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Walters, 2011).

interviews with governmental actors, from public or leaked institutional and policy documents, our goal
is to confront these governmental visions with their deployed logistics and tactics and to understand
how these impact the journeys of migrants and refugees.

Thus, we affirm the use of photographs and visual representations as a method to

comprehensively address the impacts. The AFF is key to actualizing practices of
migrant protection while combating against oppressive institutions

Carastathis 22. (Anna Carastathis is a political theorist and co-director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research in Athens. She is the
author of Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (published by the University of Nebraska Press, 2016), which was named a Choice
Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, and co-author of Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis (with visual sociologist
Myrto Tsilimpounidi, published by Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020). She is currently a co-investigator on the TransCity project (Space, Gender,
and Transitions in Athens), based in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens). So many
bordered gazes: Black Mediterranean geographies of/against anti-black representations in/by Fortress Europe. Geographica Helvetica, 77(2), 231–237.
05-19-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-77-231-2022)

Camilla Hawthorne concludes her lecture, “Black Mediterranean Geographies”, with a programmatic call
that emerges out of her analysis of the activism of Black Italians: she calls for “more capacious political
formations that are not oriented on descent-based, identitarian claims, but rather on shared political
visions, intertwined histories of struggles and resistance, and nonlinear diasporic entanglements that
disrupt state systems of categorisation” (Hawthorne, 2021). From my perspective, situated on the Aegean border of
Fortress Europe (in Athens, Greece), I read this call, and her lecture as a whole in conjunction with her collaborative
work as part of the Black Mediterranean Collective, as a radical critique of the bordering of our
imagination, the insidious and explicit state control of our vision, the fragmentation of our perception,
and the violent foreclosure of our relationships to each other . “The Mediterranean is once more confronting an important crisis of representation”, writes
the Black Mediterranean Collective (BMC, 2021:9). In the summer of 2015, European leaders declared a “refugee crisis”, which

framed an explosion of visual discourses centred on the Mediterranean and the lands and people it
connects. Seven years on, the terms of this crisis have fundamentally shifted, in line with the “rise in neo-fascism in contemporary Mediterranean migration politics” (BMC, 2021:11). This crisis of
representation is manifold, reflecting the multiple, interwoven senses of “representation”: a crisis of
representative democracy interlocked with the crisis phase of racial capitalism; a crisis of the visual,
both in terms of phenomenologies of perception (what is visible to us in experience and how our perceptual life is structured by macrologies of race, gender, class, and
other naturalised sedimentations of power) and in terms of the reproduction of images (for instance, photography ); a crisis of social movements

wrought by state-enforced demobilisation through violence and the criminalisation of solidarity , protest,
and self-organisation; and a theoretical crisis facing the multiple fields in which Hawthorne positions her
timely intervention – Black studies, European studies, geography, migration studies, feminist theory,
postcolonial studies. Every crisis, though, is an opportunity for critique – and, in my view, Hawthorne’s work embodies this possibility. Crisis enables a transformation of collective consciousness against the
control of our vision and our imaginations as we confront the exigencies and urgencies of the present and, by resisting the self-evidence of the present, as we search for distal utopian horizons to bring into reach. On the

visual level, the state attempts to enforce the terms of the crises that are hegemonically declared.
Inversion, fetishisation, objectification, and censorship naturalise the sedimented relations of power
that constitute our bodies and/in spaces. These relations of power are material as well as optic,
inculcated through colonial visual economies and racialised/gendered regimes of representation of long
historical duration. As we have seen over the past 7 years, through the use and control of photography,
as well as other means of representation, nation -states have sought to generate public consent to the
necropolitical management of the refugee crisis , to the undeclared race war against people on the
move. Underlying these crises of representation is a crisis of life and death, waged against people
crossing through the Mediterranean (and, increasingly, the Atlantic as well as the northern land borders between Turkey and Greece) into socalled “European
space”. In that sense, we might say that in 2015 European leaders declared a refugee crisis in order to
“manage” it. To this end, the refugee crisis was conflated politically and aesthetically with a crisis of arrival. That is to say, the proliferation of images of people arriving by sea on the shores of Europe – having survived
the crossing – or moving through the Balkans to arrive into central and northern Europe were important in shaping the visual narrative that equated the crisis with survival and arrival. Conflating the arrival

of “bodies” with the crisis (whether in hostile or sympathetic representations) means that people on the move landing on European
shores became equated with the “problem” to be managed. Humanitarian gazes, complicit in this framing, sought to render the people making the dangerous
sea crossings as supplicants needing “aid” in Europe – a framing that was opportune in a moment during which the European Union, Mediterranean nation-states (especially Italy and Greece), the UNHCR, and INGOs sought to
establish the infrastructure of a humanitarian economy within the borders of Europe. Hence, humanitarian reason sought to shift the representation of a “crisis of arrival” into a “crisis of reception”. Subsequent policies, legislation,
and bilateral agreements entrenched on a sociolegal level what had already become internalised through highly regulated visuals as the objective reality of this “crisis”. It is not incidental that the proliferation of photographic
images of people arriving on Lesvos or Lampedusa during this time (2015–2016) supplanted previous images of people having drowned whilst attempting to arrive. If the latter resulted in an international public outcry, the
subsequent shift in visual registers giving semantic content to crisis – from death to survival – shifted the public response from outrage at the EU and European states. The outrage generated by viewing images of death (the
shipwrecks off Lampedusa in 2013, in which hundreds of people from Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Syria drowned, and the corpse of Alan Kurdi on a beach in Bodrum in 2015) was addressed at the EU and European states held
responsible for people drowning in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Images of arrival shifted the affective response, from outrage at the regime of borders to the civil society assumption of responsibility for reception of

Images of arrival also helped in the recovery of the public image of “Europe” as
refugees, motivated variously by charity or solidarity.

a benevolent “host” to people fleeing war and persecution . Of course, to the extent that hospitality is
always inscribed and underwritten by hostility and relations of dominance, this stance is structured by
implicit xenophobia. In addition, an explicitly hostile stance expressing anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-
Arab, and anti-Asian racism inflected the struggle over images: the scene of arrival was often rendered
as the site of invasion, and the bodies of those arriving were constructed as terrorist threats. Moreover, arrival became
inscribed on those bodies, constituting a form of racialisation in which not only hostile representations but also empathetic, heteronormative representations of refugees as “fleeing families” participate. In fascist representations,

a photograph depicting thousands of people in the March of Hope

arrival or the threat of arrival became essentialised as a racial threat: for instance,

through the Balkan route, emblematic of the zeitgeist of “Refugees Welcome”, for some, was also used
by Nigel Farage in his Brexit campaign and by Viktor Orbán in his election campaign, emblazoned,
respectively, with the words “Breaking Point” and “Stop.” But hostility and hospitality are less counterstances than they are complementary gestures of white
supremacy that collude in its reproduction. As the Black Mediterranean Collective astutely argues , “the contemporary framing of the Mediterranean crisis
subscribes itself to a historicising, white, and predominantly male European gaze, which continues to
frame its excluded others as either ‘charitable subjects’ or ‘uninvited guests’ whose histories and
trajectories are consequently erased” (BMC, 2021:11). Now, 7 years on, as walling, fencing, militarised border
guarding, and encampment have become normalised across the EU and other parts of Europe, states
and supranational actors have attempted to avert the public (normatively white, male European) gaze from what, once, they
reproduced as spectacle. The explicit aims of management shifted (as expressed in the latest revision of the European Agenda on Migration) from reception and relocation to removal: behind the
euphemisms like “externalisation of borders” and “readmission to safe countries” are the concrete strategies of detention, deportation, and drowning. As yet another crisis came on the

scene (the coronavirus pandemic), under the pretext and cover of the pandemic, states cracked down
on the cultures of welcome, solidarity, and mutual aid that emerged in response to the declared crisis of
arrival. Refusing their responsibilities to asylum seekers under international law and, indeed, at times
suspending asylum processes or making asylum de facto impossible to obtain, European states,
including Italy and Greece, have sought to remove people on the move from the territory they arrogate,
through routinised pushbacks – including by forcing people onto rafts meant to save lives and setting
them out into the open sea, off-shore detention (e.g., so-called “quarantine ships”), border scrambles with other states (also declared as crises), and eviction of people on
the move from urban centres and their encampment in camps under permanent lockdown. Photography is forbidden: in camps behind razor wires and

walls, in military zones and during police operations, on fenced borders. Still, photographs are taken.
When confronted with photographic evidence of its violence and with testimonies from survivors and
witnesses, representatives of the state (like the Prime Minister and the Minister of Migration and Asylum of Greece) will say, “it’s fake news” or
“it’s propaganda”. Arrivals, they claim, have been reduced to “pre-crisis” levels; so the problem has
been managed. When it becomes difficult to state the obvious, to name violence, to see what is right in
front of our eyes – despite attempts to keep it from view, to get us to avert our gaze – when every
utterance, every representation circulates in an economy structured by censorship, this is a crisis of
representation. But who is this “we” who has an obligation to watch what has systematically been hidden from view? What is crucial is that this “we” is not a naturalised collectivity already given to us by state
power. Thus, how we constitute this “we”, which Ariella Azoulay has termed the “citizenry of photography” (Azoulay, 2008), is a political question converging with that with which Hawthorne concludes her lecture. How

do we resist the totalisation of representations in times of crisis against and beyond the bordering of our
subjectivities by states and capital? This collective subject, who has the responsibility to watch (Azoulay, 2008)
and listen to photographs (Campt, 2017) is, perhaps, the collective subject Hawthorne evokes at the end of her
lecture: created out of “shared political visions, intertwined histories of struggles and resistance, and
nonlinear diasporic entanglements”, seeking to “disrupt state systems of categorisation” (Hawthorne, 2021). The “citizenry
of photography”, as I understand it, is crosscut by and seeks to refuse the violence of national citizenship, as well as its privileges. Some of us experience this racist, gendered

border violence directly, on our bodies; others, benefiting from privileges of racialised citizenship, move
through borders (and in bordered societies) with ease and do not experience their violence. All of us are viewing (when we
should be watching) photographs: alone, together . Azoulay (2008) makes a distinction between looking at and watching photographs, noting, “[p]hotographs don’t

speak for themselves. Alone, they do not decipher a thing. Identifying what is seen doesn’t excuse the
spectator from “watching” the photograph, rather than looking at it, and from caring for its sense ” (Azoulay,
2008:25). Rather than looking at photographs through the ossifying gazes we inherit and reproduce, we must

disrupt normative frames of meaning by taking responsibility for the ongoing injustices they represent. Anti-
Blackness suffuses the normative gazes that states attempt to naturalise through their control of borders, including the borders that structure vision. Globally and in European societies in

particular, anti-Blackness is a deep structure of racial capitalism, which is institutionalised in migration

policies and fully internalised in ordinary perception. Dionne Brand has powerfully articulated how the abduction and forced
migration of enslaved Africans through the Door of No Return in transatlantic slavery “transformed us
into bodies emptied of being, bodies emptied of self-interpretation , into which new interpretations
could be placed” (Brand, 2001:93). What is crucial, both for acts of perceiving representations and for acts of
collectively generating representations – in social movements against borders, in a fundamentally anti-
Black world – is that we neither reproduce the divisions border regimes depend upon (including the racial categories of white
supremacy) nor fallaciously pretend these divisions are not material or real. Both are representational risks

with which no-border movements tarry, as they seek to effect coalitions and relations of horizontal
solidarity among people whom the nation-state system, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy consign
to differential fates. What does this mean for no-border movements? I believe it underscores the
importance of interrogating racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia – and, more generally,
a taken-for-granted heteronormativity universalising the colonial/modern binary gender system – as
these articulate capital and state power . Moreover, no-border movements have the potential to
constitute a “we” that, in its utopian moments, prefigure s collective liberation and, in its pragmatic
moments, confronts the epistemic oppression that “speaking for” people on the move entails . To quote the Black
Mediterranean Collective’s crucial insight: “This ontology of ‘spoken for’ subjects reproduces a strong, forensic epistemology

that simultaneously displaces the point of view of the living, and replaces the memorialisation of the
death” (BMC, 2021:12). Struggles against borders in the European context often trace their lineages to anti-
fascist, anti-capitalist, anarchist, and anti-authoritarian movements but less often to anticolonial and
anti-racist movements. In this connection, it feels important to point out that the “neo-fascism in contemporary Mediterranean migration politics” (BMC, 2021:11) has many guises across what is
conventionally understood as the political spectrum; like white supremacy and heteropatriarchal ideologies, it is not exclusively the currency of selfdeclared fascists, the extreme right, ethnonationalists, or neoNazis. Perhaps white
European citizens can less easily recognise fascism in the technocratic discourses of neoliberal Europe than in the explicitly racist, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Roma, and anti-Semitic (and simultaneously homophobic, transphobic,
and misogynistic) discourses of “sovereign ‘strongmen’ who have arisen in this epoch of crisis capitalism” (BMC, 2021:11). For all its hand-wringing and expressions of “concern” for the rise of “illiberal”, “draconian”, and

, the EU funds and orchestrates a veritable race war at the borders of Europe , together
“authoritarian” politics within Europe

with a range of national governments which avow various political allegiances and orientations,
including commitments to liberal democracy (which are incompatible with conventional understandings of “fascism”). Whilst people on the move are violently attacked,
tortured, and killed, migration scholars seem to have difficulty naming this a race war. The EU has constituted a dedicated military force charged with overseeing and coordinating national militaries, coastguards, and border police

Civil society
in their bordering projects, namely Frontex, which seeks over the next 5 years to increase nearly 10-fold the number of people it employs (from 1400 currently, in 2022, to 10 000 by 2027).

search-and-rescue operations, human rights monitoring, and investigative journalists in the

Mediterranean report on the violent collusion between national coastguards and border police (on all sides of the
sea and land borders), Frontex, and NATO, as well as paramilitary border hunters . Yet this violence is still overwhelmingly understood as an exception to the

“rule of law”. The massive encampment and incarceration projects based on racialised citizenship are

naturalised in research decrying “reception conditions” but not the very existence of camps, detention
centres, and borders themselves. Migration scholars tend to reproduce the self-representations of EU and other European democracies, even as they critique aspects of the migration regime.
For instance, the dubious division between so-called “economic migrants” and “refugees”, ascriptions of “vulnerability”, or carceral discourses around “trafficking” are uncritically reproduced as racialised/gendered background
assumptions even in critical migration studies. For instance, what goes unquestioned in studies of migration management infrastructure, such as the hotspot mechanism instituted in Italy and Greece in 2016, is that asylum
processes have the goal of offering “protection”, rather than expediting deportation on newly proliferating grounds. These notions, lifted from EU policy documents in myriad studies, lend academic legitimacy to the manufactured

An analysis of anti-Black racism and

hellscape of hotspots, such as the infamous Moria camp (and its successor Moria 2.0, on the firing range at Kara Tepe) on Lesvos.

coloniality in European migration studies would allow reflection on the anti-Blackness and coloniality
not only of migration regimes but, also, of the axioms of migration studies itself. As the Black Mediterranean Collective argues,
the field lacks “a systematic analysis of racism and anti-Blackness as integral to the dynamics of trans-
Mediterranean migration, exclusion, and differential incorporation” (BMC, 2021:15). Contemporary anti-Black racism has been formed by processes
of long historical duration that are defined by and define mobility and place. Thus, the aim, as I understand it, of Black Mediterranean

Geographies in the current conjuncture is not simply to intersect “Blackness” with “people on the move”
or to recognise or acknowledge that institutionalised hostility and border violence against people on the
move draws on repertoires of anti-Black racism. The theoretical paradigm that Hawthorne proposes in
her lecture goes deeper to challenge how anti-Blackness suffuses foundational categories of thought:
body, space, and race. In their introduction to their germinal edited collection, Black Geographies and
the Politics of Place, Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods identify three dilemmas in thinking about
space and race that constitute what they term “bio-geographic determinism”, a way of thinking or
imagining that makes Black geographies unknowable: first, geographic determinism, the construction of
“black bodies inherently occupying black spaces”; second, the reduction of Black geographies to flesh,
“the body as the only relevant black geographic scale”; and third, the abstraction or de-mattering of
Black geographies to devices of imagination, “metaphoric/creative spaces, which are not represented as
concrete, everyday, or lived” (McKittrick and Woods, 2007:7). The consequence of these habits of thought wrought by
white supremacy is that “race, or blackness, is not understood as socially produced and shifting but is
instead conceptualised as transhistorical, essentially corporeal, or allegorical or symbolic” (McKittrick and Woods, 2007:7).
By what violent conceptual and perceptual acts, then, does Blackness get equated with the particular and with “nuance” (Harris, 1990) whilst simultaneously being constructed as fungible (Spillers, 2003; Hartman, 1997) – mired in
place and yet perpetually out of place (Mohanram, 1999) – whilst whiteness is constructed, simultaneously, as universal, mobile, and yet an exclusive property, defined by the right to exclude (Harris, 1993)?

Hawthorne’s lecture points to a much-needed critique of migration studies as reproducing anti-Black

racism through its failure to confront anti-Black racism at the heart of the global regime of borders but,
also, in extractivist migration circuits of “differential inclusion” (Sharma, 2006), such as the exploitation of African
agricultural workers to harvest Italian tomatoes, some of which are exported to their countries of origin,
like Ghana (Auvellain and Liberti, 2014). Hawthorne points out that although “the majority of the people arriving to Italy via the central Mediterranean route were Black immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa (and, in
many cases, with direct (post)colonial ties to Italy)”, anti-Black racism has not figured in European migration studies and public discourses as “an essential part of the story” of the so-called refugee crisis post-2015 (Hawthorne,
2021). At the same time, Hawthorne notes that “there was often an unsettling tendency to uncritically impose the geographies of the Middle Passage upon what was happening in the Mediterranean” (Hawthorne, 2021), for
instance by “juxtapos[ing] the famous diagram of the slave ship Brookes . . . with aerial shots of migrant boats in the vast blue of the Mediterranean. What work do these visual comparisons do, and what analyses do they elide?”
(Hawthorne, 2021). As someone who was urged by an editor to make this comparison in an article on photographic representations of the refugee crisis, I appreciate Hawthorne’s urging us to think about the limitation of “visual
comparisons”. I am not sure if “comparison” best describes the intentional act of perception of a representation (an act of looking that is sedimented by relations of power), which itself reproduces other representations. What I
mean is that the relationship between a photograph and a woodcut print from the eighteenth century has already been forged in and through the visual economies of anti-Blackness before any comparative claim between the two

is made.What is significant here is that both the photograph and the woodcut, though using dehumanising
strategies of representation, become the visual anchor for calls, respectively, for the abolition of slavery
and for open borders. The pamphlet Description of a Slave Ship, published in 1789 by the Society for
Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, included a print of “Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck with
Negros in the Proportion of Only One to a Ton”, which was “the most famous, widely-reproduced, and
widely-adapted image representing slave conditions on the middle passage ever made” (Wood, 1997:212; see SEAST, 1789).
The photograph I believe Hawthorne is referring to in her lecture is entitled “Rescue Operation”, taken by Massimo Sestini
from a helicopter, which reproduces the framing, point of view, and arguably the cultural agenda of anti-slavery

visuals, arguably illustrating Marcus Wood’s “central premise . . . that the task of explaining why the
middle passage was represented the way it was bears not only on the past but also on the present” (Wood,
1997:212). Sestini’s “Rescue Operation” depicts people on the move, predominantly Black people, on a boat 25 km from the Libyan coast, prior to being intercepted by an Italian navy ship in Operation Mare Nostrum in 2014 (see

This point of view reproduces and

World Press Photo, 2015). This photograph was shot from a helicopter, locating the spectator above the subjects of the photograph.

normalises a military perception of humans as “targets”, whether of guns or cameras. It puts the viewer
of the photograph – presumptively the citizen – in the position of authority, surveilling the seas, whilst
locating the subjects of the photograph in a subordinate position, subject to state control, surveillance,
visibility, or extinguishment. The refugees in the crowded boat photographed by Sestini were identified through Operation Mare Nostrum (OMN), a military–humanitarian operation of the Italian
government, which deployed sea vessels, helicopters, and aircraft to monitor and control “migration flows” in the Mediterranean Sea in the aftermath of the Lampedusa shipwrecks. OMN was replaced by Frontex’s Operation

What perhaps echoes in “comparative” viewing of the two images

Triton in 2014 and Eurosur – the EU’s sea and land surveillance system using drones.

(encouraged by the framing of the photograph by the photographer) is the objectification of the people rendered as anonymous bodies, as

Wood argues, “an abolitionist cultural agenda which dictated that slaves were to be visualised in a
manner that emphasised their total passivity and their status as helpless victims” (Wood, 1997:212). The comparison between these
two images, then, as inopportune and problematic as it may be for myriad other reasons, tells us something about how people on the move – in particular when they are Black Africans – are objectified by the various racialised

the military–humanitarian gaze, the gaze of photographers, and the gaze of “empathetic”
gazes to which they are subject:

or “hostile” viewers of photographs of the refugee crisis, all of which embody white supremacy . Hawthorne points
out the limitations in attempts to make sense of the Mediterranean refugee crisis as a sedimentation of histories of anti-Black racism focussed on geographies of the Middle Passage and plantation slavery whilst being equally
critical of the “geographical sleight of hand” through which “slavery [is constructed as] something that happened ‘out there’ in the Americas” (Hawthorne, 2021). White European efforts abound to airbrush slavery from the history
of European empires, both in their colonies and in their metropoles, to excise from the historical record their participation in slavery and plunder. Indeed, these ahistorical and ageographic disavowals bolster a “post-racial” (Boulila,
2020) or “non-racist” view of contemporary European societies (Lentin, 2018), by locating racism “elsewhere” in time and place. Hawthorne critiques analytic moves to superimpose the Black Atlantic on the Black Mediterranean.
She surveys influential Black feminist theories which demonstrate how the plantation and the Middle Passage have been key to producing “modern ontological systems of categorisation and hierarchisation that continue to

determine value and access to full ‘humanness’” (Hawthorne, 2021) and the “ungendering of Black flesh” (Hawthorne:9). At the same time, Hawthorne offers a nuanced
critique of comparative approaches that elide the specificity of the historical emergence of the Black
Mediterranean by assuming that analyses in Black studies developed of the “plantation-based racial
chattel slavery” and its afterlives “can be stretched” to other geographies, such as those that
materialised in Africa or Europe or between Africa and Europe . The Black Mediterranean cannot function either as the prehistory to European conquest,
transatlantic slavery, and the Black Atlantic or as the contemporary analogue of these historically and geographically determinate processes. I want to argue that we can no longer approach the
Black Mediterranean as a (now defunct) precondition for a racial capitalist order centred on the North
Atlantic. Nor is it sufficient to approach the dynamics of the contemporary Mediterranean as merely
derivative of Black Atlantic afterlives of slavery. Instead, it is urgent to study the ongoing reproductions
of the Black Mediterranean in the present, along with all of its ongoing, nonlinear articulations with the
Black Atlantic (as well as the Black Pacific and the Black Indian Ocean). (Hawthorne, 2021) In this connection, Hawthorne poses some crucial questions about how plantation slavery may be conceptualised
transnationally, neither “reducing its relevance to a matter of bio-genealogical kinship [n]or. . . rendering it little more than a vague metaphor for anti-Blackness in general” (Hawthorne, 2021). This is connected to Hawthorne’s
deeper, germane critique of provincialising versus universalising moves in Black geographic scholarship and in vernacular geographies of anti-Black racism. She observes that “the field of Black Studies is more institutionally
established in the United States than it is in Europe, which has shaped the economies of knowledge production about the Black diaspora that some Black European scholars have come to controversially term “African American
hegemony” (Hawthorne, 2021). (Incidentally, similar claims are made by European scholars about African American feminists’ “hegemony” in intersectionality studies. The ascription of “hegemony” to scholars who are internally
colonised within North American white settler states and marginalised within AngloAmerican academies is, to put it mildly, jarring in both instances.) Whilst rejecting diffusionism, Hawthorne’s lecture prompts deeper reflection on
how ideas and activist practices circulate, “touch down” (Browne and Nash, 2019–2020), and get taken up across geographies. In this connection, her discussion of the transnational Black Lives Matter movement is illuminating .

Suggesting “we shift our focus to understand Black Lives Matter itself as a diasporic resource that is
shared back and forth across different diasporic sites – and specifically, in this case, across the Black
Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean”, Hawthorne seeks to displace framings of “Black Lives Matter
going global”, which have the tendency to “elide the work Black Italian organisers had been undertaking
for over a decade – movement work that sometimes, but not always, was explicitly connected to Black
American mobilisations”

Any NATO or European engagement fails to protect migrants. The resolution

furthers violence and continues NATO’s control. NATO is empire- it controls the
world- it will go to extensive measures to keep and expand its grasp on society

Kuus 09. (Merje Kuus is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her work analyzes the
production of foreign policy expertise in today’s European Union. Dr. Kuus has also written on state sovereignty, critical geopolitics, foreign policy
professionals, and the idea of Europe). Cosmopolitan Militarism? Spaces of NATO Expansion. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 41(3),
545–562. https://doi.org/10.1068/a40263)

Militarism and militarization are key aspects of social life today. Militarism here refers to an ideology.
the central tenet of which is that military force is a necessary resolver of conflict, whereas militarization
refers to a multifaceted social process by which military approaches to social problems gain elite and
popular acceptance (Enloe, 2004, page 219). Most militarization thus defined takes place in what is called peacetime. Its central locations are not the military or even the defense ministry; it rather operates
through civilian structures like education, entertainment, and the popular media. The emerging geographic research on militarization focuses not as much on military institutions and military conflict-although these issues are
undoubtedly important-as on the structures of legitimacy on which military force depends (Mamadouh, 2005; Woodward, 2004; see also Flint, 2005). Intersecting with scholarship in international relations (Cohn, 1987; Enloe, 2000)
and anthropology (Gusterson, 2004; Lutz, 2006), this work exposes the explicit glorification and implicit normalization of military force and military institutions throughout society (Gregory, 2004, chapter 6; Sidaway, 2003; Thrift,

). I show that militarization is not imposed on the society; it is woven through the social fabric.
2006

However, more work still needs to be done to better understand how militarization occurs in different
spheres of social life. Geographers need to engage the current period of military conflict without uncritically reifying the role of the state or the military in this process (Dalby, 1996, page 659; Flint, 2003a;
2003b). Empirically, this requires close attention to places far beyond military bases and defense ministries, to everyday practices like aid operations, cultural diplomacy, or youth NGOs-in short, the military ^ industrial ^ media ^
entertainment network that sustains and legitimizes military force (Der Derian, 2001). Examining all these `other' settings beyond the formal sphere of the state would show in greater detail that militarization extends much beyond
the promotion of military force per se, in particular that it involves the normalization of militaristic presumptions about international, national, and personal matters. Such an examination would also help us to look beyond ``politics
with a big P'' (Flint, 2003c) and to examine militarization as daily enactment. Such accounts must closely examine the role of moral claims in militarization today. Although moral arguments have always been an integral part of
justifying political violence, they have become a central feature of the post-Cold-War settlement (Chomsky, 1999). The military complex becomes a key part of the production of moral good, and, conversely, `moral intervention'
becomes a precondition for military intervention (Flint and Falah, 2004). The `enlargement' of the sphere of democratic states is thus underpinned by a militarized geography with moral rationalizations (Dalby, 2005, page 423;

These tendencies
Falah et al, 2006; Gregory and Pred, 2006). The conceptual apparatus of the `war on terror' likewise rests on universalist and globalist geographical imaginaries (Retort, 2005; Sparke, 2005).

prompt Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) to posit that today's power relations are based not on
force itself, but on the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace . Power relies
on an `ethicopolitical dynamic' in which war is no longer an activity of defense or resistance, but one
that is justified by an appeal to essential values and justice (page 11). For Hardt and Negri, empire's powers of
intervention do not begin directly with its weapons of lethal force but rather with its moral instruments
(page 35). Military intervention becomes juridically legitimate only when it is inserted into existing international consensuses. The first task of the empire is ``to enlarge the
realm of the consensuses that support its own power'' (page 15). This production of consensuses is practiced by a variety of bodies, like state institutions and the
news media, and most importantly by the so-called NGOs. For Hardt and Negri, then, NGOs form a key part of the production of imperial right because they prepare the normative space for military intervention (page 40). The
above bodies of scholarship present a number of disagreements, but they all point to the need to examine militarization at scales other than the state. Traditionally, militarism is analyzed in the context of one state, especially the
United States. That state is indeed the preeminent military power today. Its military spending amounts to nearly one half of the world's total, it operates over 800 `significant-size' military bases abroad, and it actively participates in

NATO enlargement, and the strong US support that

several military conflicts (Lutz, 2006, page 593; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2006).

makes it possible, can be seen in terms of American hegemony, of the US exercising its power
extraterritorially (Flint and Falah, 2004). It can be conceptualized as an attempt by the US to maintain
centrality in the sphere where it is still clearly the dominant military power (Agnew, 2005). However,
although global power relations today are effected in significant measure through US military power,
they are also diffuse and decentered. This relatively decentered mode of operation is the starting point
of Hardt and Negri's (cf 2000; 2004) argument about the network-like operation of power . In the passage from modern
imperialism to postmodern empire, they argue, the dialectic of inside ^ outside has been replaced by ``a play of degrees and intensity, of hybridity and artificiality'' (Hardt and Negri, 2000, pages 186 ^ 188 ). Empire

has no others; it integrates others (page 195). Today's security measures signal ``a lack of distinction
between inside and outside, between the military and the police. Whereas `defense' involves a
protective barrier against external threats, `security' justifies a constant martial activity equally in the
homeland and abroad'' (Hardt and Negri, 2004, page 21). Whereas disciplinary power closes off space,
measures of security lead to opening and globalization (Agamben, 2002). The `war on terror', then, is
not a war against terrorists; it is a war to create and maintain a social order . As such, it is spatially
indeterminate (Hardt and Negri, 2004, page 14). Hardt and Negri's thesis has a number of weaknesses that have been debated at length (Agnew, 2005; Balakrishnan, 2003; Sparke, 2005). Nevertheless, it is helpful
in pinpointing the role of publicity campaigns and transnational networks in the operation of power today (Wood, 2003). NATO offers illuminating examples of such

campaigns and networks. The alliance is separate from the military of any state. It has no military force
separate from the member states. Although forces of individual member states may work under NATO
command on specific missions, these forces are committed to such missions in a strictly
intergovernmental fashion. All missions are decided unanimously among the member states. National
expenditures on NATO are minor compared with national defense budgets. The alliance's imagery is
painstakingly international with multiple languages and multiple flags always in sight. NATO summits are
meetings of civilians-heads of state and government-and military uniforms feature only in the
background. NATO has no single command center like the Pentagon and its summits move around
among the member states. Although it is headquartered in Brussels, a city that most people associate
with wet-lunching Eurocrats rather than military men, most of its decision making is located in national
capitals. The alliance seems easy to dismiss as a minor accessory to the `real' militaries of nation-states.
Yet NATO is the indispensable alliance for Western military force today. I ts members account for roughly
two thirds of the global military expenditures, it is a key player in several military conflicts, and it is
continually bolstering its technical capabilities to operate globally .(3) The war in Kosovo was a NATO
mission and the military operations in Afghanistan likewise involve substantial NATO forces. More
importantly, NATO's norms and consensuses shape a range of domestic policy spheres in the member
and candidate states, from military spending and defense structures to civil rights in the armed forces.
The alliance's discourse of democracy and human rights now forms an integral part of the justification of
military intervention globally. It is precisely this low-key `soft' image that makes NATO an exceptionally
illuminating example of cosmopolitan militarism. The alliance prompts us to go beyond the focus on one
state, such as the US, and to consider the transnational operation of militarization in liberal democratic
societies. I use the concept of cosmopolitanism to capture the mechanisms through which NATO is
legitimized in its member and partner states. Militarism and cosmopolitanism appear to be incompatible
at first: the former associates with nationalism and statism, while the latter eschews these notions. Although
there is no single cosmopolitanism, the ideas and practices commonly described as cosmopolitan all position themselves in opposition to nationalist and statist particularity (cf Cheah and Robbins, 1998). They evoke an allegiance to
 The important question
the worldwide community of humans. This is exactly what NATO does. Through cosmopolitan rhetoric and imagery, the alliance casts itself as an agent of global peace.

here, then, is not whether NATO is a `truly' cosmopolitan institution or whether it is merely a fig leaf for
the US military ^ industrial complex; the question rather is how NATO's activities are publicly legitimized
through evoking loyalties to the whole of humanity. To use the concept of cosmopolitanism in this way
is neither to assign any core meaning to it nor to implicate all cosmopolitan practices in militarization. It
is rather to foreground the ways in which cosmopolitan spatial imaginaries can legitimize militarization .
(4) NATO is statist and intergovernmental in its institutional structure, but it is cosmopolitan in its public
legitimation in the member states.

Debate means something out of round

McDonald 2000 [ Ross Dudley McDonald, Western Washington University Honors Program Senior Projects overseen by Dr. Kelly McDonald, May 2000,
cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1235&context=wwu_honors ]//DN

The benefits of debate reach beyond just the individual and affect all of society by creating individuals
knowledgeable about issues facing the country and trained in the key tools necessary for democratic
society. Debate topics cover many of the controversial issues facing our country today, educating participants on the many aspects of these difficult issues,
issues ranging from the environment to civil rights law to rogue states. By being educated in these subjects and developing their

argumentative skills debaters are ready to help solve the issues facing our country. “Debate is the foundation of a
free society. Effective government and the smooth operation of society require people who are willing and able to develop and argue their positions in a practical

way.... Disputes do, of course, sometimes escalate. But in contexts in which people
use meaningful, productive, fair debate, we can
address and explore problems adequately and competing positions fully before reaching
decisions.”Debate becomes “a tool subject. Instrumental in helping people carry on the essential
functions of a democratic society.”

Students must critique the systems we are taught are morally good actors, use of
NATO as an actor that has the potential to impose positive change is propaganda

Davies 1966 [Richard T. Davies, American diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Poland from 1973 to 1978. A.B. 1942, Columbia College.
Assistant Director (Soviet Union and Eastern Europe education Agency), The American Commitment to Public Propaganda, Law and Contemporary Problems,
Summer, 1966, Vol. 31, No. 3, International Control of Propaganda (Summer, 1966), pp. 452-457. https://doi.org/10.2307/1190733 ]//DN

America, the exemplar, the avatar of freedom, we thought, would have minds, hearts, and hopes like a magnet and, by being itself, would changes in the world.
And, of course, it has done so and continues to do so. But that something more was needed, except during the emergency co wartime, was a concept foreign to

the view that the American Government should maintain a permanent

American minds before I945. Like ideas,

organization devoted to telling the rest of mankind about the United States had a painful birth, a
wretched childhood, and a stormy adolescence. If we now are coming into man's estate, we do so with
understandable caution. Yet it is as clear, I think, as these things can well be that the United States is
now quite thoroughly committed to speaking officially to the rest about itself , about problems of
common concern to it and other nations, its dreams, fears, and hopes for the future.